A fraternity of giants at Holy Cross

Time has a way of making giants and heroes of individuals whose only exploits were in having the courage to do the right thing at the right time. In truth, at the time of their deeds, these individuals were perhaps as vulnerable and afraid as any man can be.

This was self-evident Monday night in the reminiscences of three College of the Holy Cross alums, Arthur Martin, founder of the Black Student Union at Holy Cross; Ted Wells, a renowned trial lawyer; and Eddie Jenkins, lawyer and former Miami Dolphins football player.

The three men, speaking at the 45th anniversary of the BSU in the Hogan Campus Center, were part of an historical and courageous journey that transformed their lives and the college that opened its doors to them.

Their story, told in a recent book, “Fraternity,” by Diane Brady, is set in the cauldron of the early-to-late 1960s when hate and love, bigotry and open-mindedness, and war and peace jostled for supremacy.

There were moments during that decade when it appeared that the bad would overwhelm the good, when, as Carole King sang, “assassins just happened to do the right people in” — President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; when black girls were killed in the bombing of a black church and thousands of Americans died in the war waged in Vietnam and in the riots that raged in Detroit, Newark, Watts and Harlem.

Yet, there were also moments when the good gained ground, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were signed into law, when Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and Father John Brooks acted on moral obligation to provide opportunities for African-American students at Holy Cross.

Spurred by the assassination of Dr. King, Father Brooks, who had long pushed for an increase in African-American enrollment, launched his own personal recruitment drive in inner-city neighborhoods, seeking out talented African-American students and offering them full scholarships to Holy Cross.

In one visit to Philadelphia, “he committed the school to funding $80,000 scholarships at a time when its entire endowment was just over $1 million,” according to Ms. Brady.

The push-back from alumni, faculty and others was stiff, but Father Brooks did not falter.

“They thought I was just absolutely ridiculous,” he recalled in an NBC “Today” broadcast shortly before his death last July. “Why are you bringing them in, they are not offering you anything, they are not going to help the school. They (his critics) were reflective of the racial attitudes that were fairly consistent in the United States at the time.”

Father Brooks’ stance on civil rights “wasn’t just moral but practical: There was an ambitious generation of black men growing up in America, and the college was missing out on a chance to shape it,” Ms. Brady wrote in “Fraternity.” “… No college could pride itself on developing the nation’s future leaders when it largely ignored the potential of an entire group of talented young men ...”

Mr. Wells and Mr. Jenkins were among the students Father Brooks recruited and mentored. Others in this group included Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward Jones and former NYC deputy mayor and investment banker Stanley Grayson.

While they benefited greatly from the opportunity offered by Holy Cross, these men in turn played a role in expanding the college’s multicultural vision and practice.

“We came in as father and son,” Mr. Jenkins said Monday in explaining the fatherly figure Father Brooks played in their lives. “But we went out as man and man, because we helped shaped him also.”

It is a sentiment that captured the group’s association with the whole college community, because Mr. Jenkins and his fellow African-American students forced the college to see them as more than just recruitment numbers. They forced the college to understand the social, cultural and economic forces that threaten and mold their lives as African-Americans.

It is scary that today we are resurrecting some of the old battles Father Brooks and these men waged. The Supreme Court, for example, is taking up or being asked to revisit affirmative-action and voting-rights cases.

Still, as the nation wrestles with two vastly different philosophies of what kind of country we want to be, it is comforting to know that our heroes of tomorrow will be shaped from ordinary people having the courage to do the right thing today.

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